The Best Laser Printer

After nearly 250 hours of research and testing over the past few years, we’ve found that the best choice for an affordable laser printer right now is the Brother HL-L2340DW. Among the dozens of laser printers we’ve looked at, the L2340DW is one of the most economical and least frustrating printers you can buy.

The HL-L2340DW is among the cheapest printers to operate that we’ve tested, with a cost per page of only 2.3 cents, including wear on the drum. It’s also easy to set up, and it works reliably on most simple wireless networks and almost any modern laptop, smartphone, or tablet (yes, including Chromebooks). Since it’s a laser printer, it’s well suited to running every day, sitting idle for weeks at a time, or anything in between. It can do automatic two-sided printing, too, and print speeds are quick. No printer is perfect—the L2340 struggles on some networks (we’ll share some workarounds later on) and its default print quality could be better, though it’s fine on higher-quality settings. Despite the shortcomings, the L2340 is the most sensible choice for most people who need to make hard copies of term papers, tax forms, concert tickets, or other text-based documents from their home, home office, or dorm room.

If our pick is out of stock or too expensive, grab this near-identical version instead. It’s a little faster and has an Ethernet port, but otherwise it’s the same machine.

If the L2340 is out of stock or its price jumps, consider the Brother HL-L2360DW instead. It’ll print a few extra pages a minute and has an Ethernet port if you want to plug it into a home network instead of connecting via Wi-Fi or USB. But otherwise it’s just like our main pick: Same design, same interface, same toner, same print quality.

With a flatbed scanner and a 50-page document feeder to handle large jobs, this speedy monochrome multifunction printer is a cost-effective upgrade.

If you want an affordable monochrome laser printer that can also copy and scan, the Samsung Xpress M2875DW is a good choice. While most other laser printers at this price only have a flatbed scanner, the M2875DW has an automatic document feeder, which can handle multi-page documents much faster. Setup is easy, cost per page is low, and its print, copy, and scan quality all compare favorably to other multifunction machines we’ve tested.

This color laser all-in-one can handle most common tasks in a home-office or small-business setting, for a price.

If you have more serious print and scan needs but don’t quite have the budget (or workload) to justify a business-class printer, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw is a upgrade over our other picks. It delivers high-quality color prints, copies, and scans; it’s much faster than cheaper models; and it offers more robust admin settings and security options for use in an office environment. Color laser machines like the LaserJet Pro cost more to buy and run than inkjet printers with comparable features. But laser printers are sturdier and more reliable than inkjets, and if you want the best one for a home or home office with moderate printing and paper-handling needs, this one hits the sweet spot.

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Why you should trust us

We’ve been testing printers since 2012, spending hundreds of hours since then on researching and testing, and editor Liam McCabe (who wrote earlier versions of this guide) has been covering printers since we began considering the category. I’m new to the category, but I’m a former editor at Reviewed.com and have experience as a reviewer of consumer electronics, specializing in photography and imaging gear.

We surveyed our readers, kept an eye on feedback in our comments section and email inboxes as well as following Twitter feeds to better understand our readers’ real-world needs. We also considered reviews from other editorial sources including CNET, Computer Shopper, Consumer Reports (subscription required), and PC Mag, and read many hundreds of customer reviews at retailers’ websites, primarily Amazon.

All told, we’ve spent about 250 hours researching and testing all types of home and home-office printers over the years. For this guide to laser printers alone, we’ve considered 102 different printers and tested 11 of them. And in this particular update you’re reading now, we’ve put in about 20 hours of research and testing, so that we could add recommendations for a couple of new types of laser printers, based on reader requests.

Who should get this

If you print less than once a week on average, or mostly print text-first documents, a mono laser printer is probably all you need.

Laser printers can be a more economical, less frustrating alternative to inkjets. While laser printers tend to cost more to buy at first, they’re often cheaper to operate because monochrome toner is so inexpensive. Toner cartridges don’t have to be replaced as often as ink cartridges and are less of a burden. Unlike inkjets, a laser printer won’t clog up if you go weeks or months between print jobs. Laser printers also tend to be faster than inkjets, and they usually produce sharper-looking text as well.

If you print less than once a week on average, or mostly print text-first documents—like school assignments, invoices, shipping labels, tax forms, real estate applications, personal records, permission slips, tickets—a mono laser printer is probably all you need. Assuming, that is, you really need a printer at all.

So who shouldn’t get a laser printer? If you don’t have a lot of money to spend but need to print in color, an inkjet printer is the only way to go. Inkjets are also the only (relatively) affordable way to print glossy, high-quality photos at home. And a decent inkjet that can scan, copy, and print in color costs much less than a color laser machine with the same features. We recommend some decent inkjet machines here.

How we picked

Based on the best-seller lists at major retailers, most people want a printer that’s affordable, with a low cost per page and minimal maintenance—a simple machine that can handle basic jobs. Most of those printers are monochrome laser printers, so we focused on those when considering candidates for our main pick.

To start, we scouted for all the current monochrome (black and white) laser printers we could find for under $200, our cutoff for affordability. Then we whittled these down to printer-only models (we considered copy/scan models separately), and those with automatic duplex printing, Wi-Fi, and support for mobile printing. We also favored models with cheaper toner costs. To winnow out any clunkers that had good specs but poor real-world performance, we read through dozens of customer reviews and editorial reviews.

Disclosure: We did all the testing for print-only models back in early 2015. For this update you’re reading right now, we scouted the field again, but we didn’t find any new models that presented a serious challenge to our main pick, so we didn’t see a need to re-test.

Plenty of people want a copier and scanner in addition to a printer, so we also sought out a great monochrome multifunction printer. We looked for models with a reasonable purchase price, low toner costs, Wi-Fi connectivity, mobile apps, duplex printing, and an automatic document feeder (rather than just a flatbed scanner). We winnowed down a pool of 42 mono MFPs and ended up with a shortlist of three finalists: the Brother DCP-L2540DW, the Canon imageCLASS MF247dw, and the Samsung Xpress SL-M2875DW.

Finally, we looked for a high-end color laser all-in-one for people with more serious small office or home office needs. It needed to be fast and flexible, offer great print and scan quality, and have a relatively affordable price tag, if possible (though none of these machines are cheap). Filtering through the color laser AIOs from top manufacturers, we arrived at four models that checked off all our requirements at a reasonable price: the Brother MFC-9340CDW, the Canon color imageCLASS MF726Cdw, the HP Color LaserJet Pro M277dw, and the HP Color LaserJet Pro M477fdw, the upgrade pick in our all-in-one printer guide.

How we tested

The first few minutes you spend setting up your printer can tell you a lot about what it’s going to be like to own the thing for the next few years. It’s a sign of how much effort the manufacturer put into the design and execution, so we paid close attention to the setup process. We set up each printer on both a Windows PC and a Mac, following the manufacturer’s instructions and trying to use Wi-Fi where possible. We considered setup a success once we could print a page from a web browser and then shut the printer off, turn it back on, and get it to print again.

We also tested out other connectivity standards. We tried mobile printing from an Android phone via each manufacturer’s Android print service, as well as from an iPhone via AirPrint. Then, we installed and printed from the proprietary mobile apps the manufacturers offered. We also tested native Google Cloud Print connectivity—an especially important feature for Chromebook users, since there are no native printer drivers for Chrome OS. We considered Google Cloud Print compatibility a success when we could print from a phone using cellular data, without a “host” PC or Mac as the go-between.

The first few minutes you spend setting up your printer can tell you a lot about what it’s going to be like to own the thing for the next few years.

For print-quality testing, we used reference documents that were predominantly text-based, with some elements like columns, tables, or charts. They include: instructions for the 1099 tax form, a star chart designed for lens sharpness testing, a document from the International Organization of Standards (ISO) meant to mimic a typical office report, and a simple Word/PDF document with the same sentence repeated in descending font size from 72 points to 1 point. We printed a few photos and a grayscale test chart, too, since more data is always better, and it can be instructive to see how each printer handles material that really pushes against the limit of its capabilities.

We also checked out each printer’s quality options, including toner-density sliders and any available print-resolution settings to see what you can expect with toner-saving options and whether we could eke out better-looking text.

Experimenting with quality settings also helped us get familiar with the print menus. We spent time in the standard print box, as well as the hidden control panels that most printers have.

To test duplex speed, we printed out five copies of the four-page ISO document. For single-sided printing, we ran off four copies of the ISO document. We also tried duplex printing at the highest quality setting for each printer. These tests give us a feel for not just how fast a printer will be able to spit out a 10-page book report, but if the differences between them are substantial enough to make a difference in day-to-day life.

For the multifunction printers, we added speed tests for copying and scanning a large (54-page) document, composed of mixed output from our printing tests. We also tested the scan quality of each MFP or AIO using a glossy test photo printed on our all-in-one pick, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8720. We scanned at all available resolutions and looked for notable qualitative differences between each machine’s output, from sharpness to color rendition and contrast.

We also stress-tested all the paper-feeding parts of each printer, including the main paper trays and document feeders if the printer had one. We (slightly) overstuffed them with paper to see if they’d jam, and we also fed them single sheets to see if they could pick each up.

The HL-L2340DW prints pages for cheaper than its peers, is easier to set up, and will work with just about any modern laptop, smartphone, or tablet.

The Brother HL-L2340DW monochrome laser printer is the laser printer that we think will work the best for most people. Toner is a bargain, and it was easier to add to a simple home network than other models like it. All the crucial features you can expect from a decent document printer are here: Wi-Fi, auto duplexing, and support for important mobile printing standards. Text is crisp, and print speed is as fast as you’d ever need in a home office.

The more you print, the more the math favors the Brother.

While the L2340DW’s default print quality is worse than that of its closest competitor, the Samsung M2835DW, it’s fine for most home use. If you boost the print-quality setting, the difference mostly vanishes anyway. Even with that downside, we think the L2340DW is the better affordable laser printer overall because it’s easier to set up and troubleshoot, and user reviews suggest that it’s more reliable over a couple of years, too. You probably (probably) won’t ever feel like beating the L2340DW to a pulp Office Space–style.

The best thing about the L2340 is the dirt-cheap cost of ownership. It only uses about 1.7 cents’ worth of toner per page.1 Even counting the wear on the drum,2 the cost works out to about 2.3 cents—less than most other non-professional printers out there. Compared to a similarly low-cost inkjet printer, you’ll save something like $20 per year on document printing even if you print just 500 pages per year. The more you print, the more the math favors the Brother.

At the time of this writing, the price of the L2340 has been hovering around $100 at major retailers. If you’re ready to buy and it’s more than $10 or so above that price, wait a few days to see if it drops—prices change all the time in this category, so be patient if you can. Since it’s been as low as $70, your patience could be rewarded in a big way.

The one-line, 14-character monochrome LCD gives the L2340 an edge, because some of its competitors have no displays at all.

If you want, you can stretch your pennies even further with the L2340. Automatic two-sided printing helps save paper. Toner Save mode can extend the lifespan of a cartridge (though the print quality is awful). If you’re comfortable using third-party supplies, plenty of reputable toner cartridges and drum replacements are available through trustworthy suppliers, all cheap enough to get the cost per page down to about one cent.3

Setting up cheap printers is often a headache, but we found the L2340 to be less of a pain than its closest competitors. We got it up and running in 10 minutes without a USB cable or an installation CD. Try not to laugh, but the one-line, 14-character monochrome LCD gives the L2340 an edge, because some of its competitors have no displays at all.

In our testing, the L2340 worked smoothly with most systems and standards: Mac and Windows, USB and Wi-Fi, AirPrint and Google Cloud Print, and a few more. Mostuserreviewers found setup to be pretty easy too. A small subset of users have reported difficulties with wireless networking, which can be true of pretty much every cheap printer. The good news is that there are ways to fix those issues, which we cover below.

Like any laser printer, the L2340 prints good-looking text. Large letters have crisp edges and dark centers, and small text is legible down to two-point font. Print expert Dean Turpin says that it’s absolutely fine for printing any text-first document, including official forms. Owners seem happy with the print quality—we haven’t found any user reviews that complain about text legibility. M David Stone at PCMag writes that the text is subpar by laser standards, but admits that it’s “good enough for most business use,” and adds “even subpar text for a laser is better than you’ll get from most inkjets.”

The Brother HL-L2340DW (left) produces text that’s plenty crisp and sharp at sizes as small as 2 points, though on close inspection, the Samsung M2835DW (right) outperforms it. Photo: Liam McCabe

Like any laser printer, the L2340 is fast. (We actually tested the HL-L2360DW, the step-up-but-not-really model, which is slightly quicker than the L2340.) In our tests, we measured about 29 ppm with plain text, though the figure drops to about 15 ppm for duplex printing. That’s a little bit slower than the Samsung M2835DW, which we clocked at about 31 ppm, though the Brother duplexes faster. But listen: All of these printers are so fast that the extra speed just does not matter for almost anybody who should own a printer like this. When you print your tax returns in the spring, it’s either going to take one minute or one minute and a few seconds. And compared to inkjet printers, which often need to take a minute to clean out their print heads before they get going, laser printers always start their jobs within a few seconds.

Printing from a mobile device to the L2340 works smoothly enough, whether it’s via AirPrint on iOS, or Brother’s proprietary iOS and Android apps, or Google Cloud Print, which works with any system, including Chromebooks (even without a host computer).

The L2340 is smaller and shorter than most mono laser printers, at roughly 14 by 14 by 7 inches, which should be small enough to comfortably fit on top of or under most desks, or on big shelves. The 250-sheet paper tray fits paper as large as 8.5 by 14 inches (legal size), and sits completely inside the machine. Some competitors, like the Samsung M2835DW, have a tray that sticks out of the back of the machine, so that it doesn’t quite fit into a corner or against a wall.

We couldn’t jam the L2340 even when we tried, but there’s an access hatch on the back if you need to clear obstructions. The front panel opens outward for access to the toner cartridge and drum. And there’s a single-sheet manual feed, if you want to try printing notecards, envelopes, or labels (more on that later).

The one-line, monochrome LCD makes it easier to set up and troubleshoot the Brother HL-L2340DW than some other cheap laser printers. Photo: Kimber Streams

The L2340’s interface is acceptable, as long as you plan to stick to easy print jobs on typical paper sizes. Brother doesn’t include print manager software, but we don’t think anyone will miss it. Options within the system dialog are limited to the common changes—landscape or portrait orientation, paper type, duplex printing, print quality, and a few others. Print quality can also be adjusted on the tiny, one-line LCD, if you want to do it that way. A browser-based control panel lets you make some obscure adjustments to admin settings and print quality, but unless you need to set up native Google Cloud Print access, you’ll probably never get that deep into the interface. Brother has drivers available for operating systems dating back to OS X 10.7 and Windows XP. (Linux is covered, too.)

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Contrast is flat, textures are grainy, and there’s noticeable banding.

There is no such thing as a perfect printer, and the Brother L2340 is no exception.

First and foremost, the L2340 may be an adequate graphics printer for some people, but it’s not a great one. Contrast is flat, textures are grainy, and there’s noticeable banding. Our print expert Dean Turpin thought that we might’ve been testing a lemon, but it wasn’t just our unit. Other owners have beef with the quality, and PCMag’s David Stone writes, “it’s good enough for any internal business need, but not for something you’ll want to hand out to a client or customer when you’re trying to make a good impression.”

Mono laser printers never print good-looking graphics, but the Brother HL-L2340DW (left) struggles a bit more than most with gradients and fine details, and there’s some visible banding as well. The Samsung M2835DW (right) resolves more of the light grays, and creates a better-defined, smoother-looking print. Photo: Liam McCabe

As long as you know what you’re getting into, you’ll probably be OK with the graphics quality. Layout elements like column dividers, charts, tables, or other simple elements are fine, so don’t be afraid to print invoices, tax forms, memos, or anything along those lines. But images will not look very good. If print quality is important to your business, buy a better printer than this or outsource your important jobs to a print shop.

The Brother HL-L2340DW (left) produces inconsistent textures compared to the Samsung M2835DW (right), though the quality is still acceptable for tax forms or most other official documents. Photo: Liam McCabe

The L2340 is probably not the right printer if you need to print on anything besides letter- or legal-sized paper. Yes, it has a manual feeder that you can use to print envelopes and notecards, but getting it to work well is hit-or-miss. It put a big ol’ crease in every envelope we tried to print (though a reader shared an easy solution to this problem). The print drivers are not the best, so you may have a hard time lining up the text on things like labels. It emulates PostScript, like all printers do these days, but it’s crummy emulation, so it may have trouble crisply reproducing uncommon fonts that aren’t baked into the printer itself.

The L2340 is probably not the right printer if you need to do print on anything besides letter- or legal-sized paper.

This won’t affect most users, but Brother skimped on built-in memory—the L2340 has just 32 MB. That’s plenty of memory for most typical text files, but if you’re printing very long documents (upwards of 30 pages, depending on the fonts, images, and layout of the files), the printer may not be able to complete the job in one pass. Your mileage may vary. For comparison, the Samsung M2835DW that we tested has 128 MB of memory, so it can handle much larger print jobs if needed.

One of our readers pointed out to us that the L2340 prints relatively low-quality text when it’s working through native Google Cloud Print. If you’re a Chrome OS user and need to print fine text (the example we saw was mangled math equations), the L2340 may not be acceptable. We’re not sure whether competing models are any better, but it seems like the problem stems from Brother’s shoddy drivers.

As with any wireless device, the L2340 may encounter connectivity problems. The most common issue is that sometimes the printer doesn’t wake up from Deep Sleep mode. This happened to us just once during our months-long test period, but it’s been a chronic issue for some of our readers. If you’re affected by this, the first step we’d recommend is to make sure that you’re using the official Brother drivers instead of generic drivers like AirPrint. If that doesn’t fix your issue, one reader shared a solution4 that involves adjusting a few settings—including disabling Deep Sleep altogether.

Some users ran into trouble installing the L2340 wirelessly. If you haven’t been able to get the printer to work wirelessly at all, your first step should be to reset the network settings. From there, try a wired installation, even if you plan to use the printer wirelessly. One reader wrote that even with the wired connection, it took quite a while for his printer and router to spot each other. After a couple of failed attempts, he decided to walk away in the middle of the process, but when he came back after a few hours, it had succeeded.

What are the chances that you’ll run into network trouble with the L2340? Well, it has a relatively strong user rating on Amazon: 4.0 out of 5, based on more than 2,900 user reviews (at the time of writing). That’s a solid score, since pretty much all printers suck. Yes, the L2340’s tally includes more than 400 1-star reviews (also at the time of writing), many of which are from people who ran into connectivity problems. That’s not great. We can’t promise you’ll be able to make it work, but we think most connectivity problems are fixable. Most people won’t run into these problems in the first place, and we can’t promise that any other affordable laser printer is any better, either.

A word to the wise: Find the Toner Replace menu under the General tab on the back-end control panel, and switch it to “Continue” as soon as you can. Some user reviewers note that the printer fires off a “low toner” warning even when there’s plenty of toner left in the cartridge. That prevents you from printing at all until you change the cartridge—basically robbing you of a few dozen pages’ worth of toner (if not more). When you switch it to Continue, you’ll get to use all of your toner. It is sketchy that Brother sets it to Stop by default, tricking you into buying more toner than you need. But most printer companies try to rip off their customers one way or another. There are no angels here.

If our pick is out of stock or too expensive, grab this near-identical version instead. It’s a little faster and has an Ethernet port, but otherwise it’s the same machine.

The HL-L2360DW is the fraternal-twin Brother (hiyo!) to the HL-L2340DW, and is worth grabbing if it’s cheaper or easier for you to get your hands on or if you need an Ethernet port. The L2360 can print a few extra pages per minute, but they’re both wicked fast for home-use standards, and you probably won’t notice the difference. From what we’ve seen so far, the L2360 tends to cost a few dollars more than the L2340, and isn’t available at as many stores. But again, the differences hardly matter—follow your wallet.

A practical multifunction monochrome printer

The Samsung M2875DW laser printer/scanner/copier is tall, but it has the same footprint as print-only mono laser machines. Photo: Ben Keough

With a flatbed scanner and a 50-page document feeder to handle large jobs, this speedy monochrome multifunction printer is a cost-effective upgrade.

If you want an affordable printer that can also copy and scan, the Samsung Xpress M2875DW mono-laser is our favorite option. The cost of operation is low, and it’s easier to install than most of its competitors. It also has a 50-page auto document feeder, whereas many of its competitors only have a flatbed scanner. The ADF makes it much easier to copy and scan multi-page documents. The M2875DW also has reliable Wi-Fi connectivity, auto-duplex printing, convenient mobile apps, and support for both AirPrint and Google Cloud Print. We think it’s best for home users, but it could work for a small office with modest needs.

Getting the M2875DW up and running is straightforward. A quick installation guide walks you through the setup of the physical machine, and a separate guide helps you set up the Wi-Fi connectivity, which is a mostly automated process. On both Windows and Mac machines, we were up and running within 15 minutes—right on par with the other mono multifunction printers (MFPs) we tested, the Brother DCP-L2540DW and the Canon imageCLASS MF247dw.

The M2875DW prints better-looking text and graphics than its competitors. While the Brother DCP-L2540DW prints dark images rife with banding, and the Canon MF247DW produces graphics so light they’re sometimes hard to see, the Samsung strikes a solid middle ground with appropriate brightness and smooth tonality. Fonts are dark, remain legible down to 2 points, and don’t have the speckles or jagged edges that can come out of some other cheap laser printers. Even in the resource-conserving Toner Save and Eco modes, print is easy to read down to 4 points. We saw little to no evidence of banding or artifacts, and it reproduces textures and gradients more accurately than other laser printers we’ve tested. It also allows more control than our main pick over print options, though you’ll need to install Samsung’s bloated print-manager software.

The Samsung M2875DW scanned a 54-page document in 5 minutes, 26 seconds, which is about three minutes faster than other models we tested.

For home use, the M2875 is plenty speedy. In our testing, it hit about 18 ppm while printing a standard, single-sided IRS 1099 PDF. Two-sided printing slows things down a bit, to about 11 ppm. Those results are in the same ballpark as the other two mono MFPs we tested; the Canon was a tiny bit faster, and the Brother a touch slower. (We can’t really compare these results to the results we gathered for our main pick, since we printed different documents over different networks in different years.) Samsung advertises 29 pages per minute, which is probably true in certain conditions (like simple, letter-style text documents in common fonts that we used for testing our main picks), but you’re unlikely to see that speed in the real world.

For scanning, the Samsung M2875DW went through a 54-page document in about 5 minutes, 26 seconds while outputting to a Windows laptop. That’s about three minutes faster than both the Brother and Canon models we tested. When scanning to a mobile device, the Samsung took exactly the same amount of time, while the Canon was inexplicably faster and Brother’s mobile app crashed under the strain. The Samsung is reliable; that’s good enough for us.

Scan quality on the M2875DW is acceptable. Text looks great, and scanned photos have excellent color reproduction and contrast. Details aren’t quite as sharp as we’ve seen from its competitors, particularly the Canon MF247DW, but for regular document scanning, it’s totally fine. The M2875DW also comes with optical character recognition (OCR) software to turn scanned documents into text docs. However, we found it didn’t work very well, sometimes skipping entire words or inserting garbage characters. You’ll probably need to give your OCR’d documents a once-over to make them presentable. Or, you can bring your own OCR software.

Mobile printing works smoothly with all the major mobile standards. If you want to use Samsung’s proprietary mobile apps, we found that those work fine, too. The main app is Samsung Mobile Print, available for both iOS and Android. As with similar apps from Brother, Canon, HP, and Epson, the Samsung app lets you print to or scan from a machine on the same Wi-Fi network as your phone, and can also interact with cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. In addition to the main app, Samsung offers its own Samsung Cloud Print service. It’s a nice thought, but since it’s virtually identical to the more-popular Google Cloud Print, we see very little reason to bother with Samsung’s clone.

Reviews of the M2875 series (including various non–Wi-Fi or non-duplex variants) have been generally positive, though they haven’t been reviewed as widely as models from competing brands. PC Mag wrote that the nearly identical M2875FW “does an unusually good job of offering lots of strong points and no real weaknesses,” and concluded that its “particular balance of speed, output quality, paper handing, MFP basics, and small conveniences […] adds up to the proverbial more than the sum of its parts.” Business Computing World agreed, saying that “given the low purchase price, Samsung’s Multifunction Xpress M2875FW represents very good value for money.” Other outlets, like Tech Radar, PC Advisor, Trusted Reviews, and Expert Reviews all liked it, too.

Like all printers, the Samsung M2875DW has shortcomings. For one thing, its two-line monochrome display isn’t the easiest to work with—the Canon MF247DW’s four-line touch panel is a substantial upgrade. The printer also has to warm up each time it comes out of sleep mode (though this takes only a couple seconds), and sometimes emits mechanical noises when it’s supposed to be asleep. That doesn’t happen too often, but it could get annoying if it’s positioned near your bed, like it would be in a dorm room. We also had issues with duplex printing from our MacBook Pro after upgrading to macOS Sierra, but a recent driver update fixed the problem. Moral of the story? Always make sure you’re running the latest drivers.

User reviews for the M2875DW and its relatives, while positive, are few and far between. The M2875DW holds an average of 4.2 stars but from just nine reviews at Amazon. The non-duplex M2875FW rates 3.8 out of 5 with 93 reviews, which is not great. Other reviews at Best Buy, Newegg, and Samsung.com have similar averages. This is a similar score as the non-scanning Samsung M2835DW that we cover above, which was dinged by many owners for Samsung’s poor customer service. That could be behind the scores for the M2875 variants as well. However, its strong performance in our tests assuaged some of our concerns, and we still think it’s the best bet among its competitors.

This color laser all-in-one can handle most common tasks in a home-office or small-business setting, for a price.

If you need (or just want) a more serious laser printer, the HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw is the most affordable all-in-one that can print in color, and it comes with all of the most important productivity features, including duplex printing and scanning, wireless connectivity, and a fax. This is a solid fit for many home offices and some small businesses, and it’s still more affordable than the hulking enterprise machines you’d see at your local cubicle farm.

Like most laser printers, the M477fdw is very fast. We clocked its print speeds at around 27 pages per minute, even over Wi-Fi. Scanning is speedy, too: It can scan both sides of a page on a single pass, and we timed it at 25 single-sided black and white pages per minute, or 11 double-sided color pages per minute. And as befits a pro-oriented machine, the M477 is up and printing just a couple of seconds after you begin the print job—even if you’ve let it sit for weeks between uses. (Our Samsung step-up pick, in contrast, takes a few extra seconds to warm up after sleep.)

We found that the M477fdw produces very sharp text, outdoing our main and step-up picks at smaller font sizes. Graphics look clean and crisp, with accurate colors and smooth edges; there’s none of the banding and excessive darkness or lightness that we’ve seen from budget machines. The results are suitable for everything from personal use to business presentations. You’ll never have to worry about the quality.

The M477fdw’s toner costs are about the same as the Brother MFC-9340CDW, and cheaper than the Canon color imageCLASS MF726Cdw and HP’s own Color LaserJet Pro M277dw. Black-and-white pages cost about 2 cents, while color pages cost about 12 cents.

Contrary to popular myth, color laser printers are not any cheaper to use than similarly specced inkjet printers. Our favorite inkjet all-in-one, for example, has roughly the same black-and-white cost per page as the HP M477fdw, but actually prints in color for cheaper. And the inkjet costs several hundred dollars less up front. If the price is an obstacle, don’t be afraid to consider an AIO inkjet instead.

The results are suitable for everything from personal use to business presentations. You’ll never have to worry about the quality.

However, there are good reasons to buy a color-laser AIO instead of an inkjet. Color laser printers are built sturdier than comparable inkjets, rated for higher workloads, and tend to last longer, too. The HP M477fdw, for example, has a recommended maximum page count of 4,000 pages per month, while our favorite inkjet can handle just 2,000. Color laser AIOs also print faster and start jobs quicker, too. And laser printers can sit almost indefinitely between uses with little downside, whereas inkjets dry out after a couple of weeks and will need to run ink-wasting cleaning cycles to get back into working shape. If money is not your top concern, color laser AIOs are the better choice.

HP makes plenty of similar LaserJet models (including variants in the 477 series), so if you don’t think you need all the features that this specific model offers, look around—you can expect similar performance elsewhere in the line.

The competition

Print-only & flatbed-scanning printers

We looked at more than 20 low-cost print-only or flatbed-scanner models, including some of the following near-misses:

The Samsung Xpress SL-M2835DW is another decent, cheap mono-laser printer that isn’t all that different from the Brother. The Samsung has better print quality and comes with a bigger toner cartridge than the Brother. But because the Samsung has no LCD of any kind, it’s harder to set up and troubleshoot, and it can be more finicky on certain home networks. The customer reviews are worse, too. But printer prices can shift wildly from day to day, and the Samsung M2835 is often much cheaper than the Brother L2340. Sometimes, the toner is cheaper, too. So if you see a good deal on the Samsung and can live with the caveats, it’s worth considering. The Brother is just a safer pick most of the time.

The older Samsung M2825DW, which was our cheap printer pick before the M2835DW replaced it, is still available through some retailers. The only difference is that it’s missing the NFC tap-to-print feature, which almost nobody uses anyway as far as we can tell. If you find it for cheap, it’s worth considering.

The Brother HL-L2380DW is essentially the same machine as our main pick and runner up, plus a flatbed scanner bolted to the top. In a previous version of this guide, it was our step-up pick for people who needed a scanner. We still like it, but based on reader feedback, we wanted our new scanner picks to have automatic document feeders. So we’ve retired the L2380 from our recommended models.

The Canon imageClass LBP6230dw is cheap, small, and has auto duplexing and Wi-Fi connectivity. But the cost per page is more than 4 cents, and it doesn’t support AirPrint or Google Cloud Print. Pass.

The Dell E310dw looks almost identical in form and features to our pick, the Brother HL-L2340DW. We haven’t had the chance to test the Dell ourselves to see if there are any noticeable differences from the Brother. But we think it’s probably a fine pick if you’ve done your own research and you’re sure it’s the one you want, or if you see it on sale for considerably less than the L2340.

We considered a total of 42 monochrome multifunction or all-in-one printers before arriving at our shortlist of three test models. These are the near-misses that we didn’t test:

The Brother MFC-L2740DW offers duplex copy, scan, and fax, as well as a color touchscreen—all nice upgrades over our mono MFP pick. However, we think that for most users, those extras won’t justify its much higher price. Consider it only if you really need fax functionality and/or duplex scanning.

The Brother MFC-L2700DW is usually more expensive than the DCP-L2540DW we tested, without the features to justify the surcharge. Its only notable advantage is that it has a fax line, but it’s also slower than the cheaper Brother model. Otherwise, it’s pretty much identical. We’d skip it for the same reasons we didn’t pick the L2540DW.

The Canon imageCLASS MF227dw has recently been replaced by the MF247dw that we tested. The two are identical, for all intents and purposes; the new model has a bit more memory and a few minor software tweaks. If you can find the MF247dw on clearance for a lot less than the Samsung M2875DW, give it a look. Otherwise, pass.

The Dell E515dw is pretty cheap and has solid user reviews, but professional reviewers don’t think nearly as highly of it. Combine that with high cost per page and a surprisingly low duty cycle, and we had enough evidence to pass it up.

The HP LaserJet Pro M225dw has the unfortunate distinction of being too much printer for most mono MFP buyers and too little printer for the money. It’s also slower than our pick, with higher cost per page. Skip it.

The Samsung Xpress M2885FW is an older model than the M2857DW we picked, usually costs more, and its only real advantage is NFC connectivity for easier mobile printing. That said, if it’s cheaper than the M2875, give it a look.

The Xerox WorkCentre 3225 is quick, has a larger duty cycle than most mono MFPs, and its cost per page is only a little higher than our pick. Unfortunately, it costs a lot more to start with, and user reviews are much harsher, with many complaining that it’s simply not very user-friendly.

Though there are fewer home user-friendly color laser all-in-ones than mono MFPs or cheap mono print-only models, there are still a decent few to choose from. Here are some that we considered.

The Brother MFC-9340CDW looks to be a good deal with its all-mode duplexing, affordable toner, and relatively low up-front cost, but it’s slower than our color AIO pick and has had a rash of one-star user reviews complaining about fused toner rollers and Wi-Fi connectivity problems. For those reasons, think twice before considering it.

The Canon color imageCLASS MF726Cdw is cheaper than our color AIO pick, but there are some tradeoffs. It prints noticeably slower—21 ppm, compared to 28 ppm for the HP M477fdw—and its toner costs are significantly higher (about 1-3 cents per page). Consider it only if the price difference to the HP is particularly huge.

The HP Color LaserJet Pro M277dw also costs considerably less than the M477fdw, but it’s much slower, doesn’t do duplex scanning or copying, and has more expensive toner. In short, we didn’t feel it was a big enough step up from our mono MFP pick. That said, if you don’t care about speed or the other extras the M477fdw offers, it could be a good choice.

The OKI Data MC362w has competitive toner costs (at current street prices), a reasonable shelf price, and solid user reviews. It also has some nifty extras, like a full QWERTY keyboard to make entering passwords less painful. However, it’s slower than other color laser AIOs, extremely heavy (more than 20 percent heavier than the already-very-heavy HP M477fdw), and users complain of complicated setup and a voracious appetite for toner. Pass.

Footnotes:

When a manufacturer says that a cartridge will print 3,000 pages, they mean it’ll print 3,000 pages with 5 percent of the surface covered by toner—a double-spaced document with no headers or footers, basically. Yeah, that’s on the low side of what you usually print in the real world. But it’s an industry standard—all manufacturers use that as a reference point. We’d be willing to guess that most text-only pages have about 7 percent coverage, and graphics bump it up to at least 10 percent. For simplicity’s sake, we stuck with the estimated capacities that the manufacturers advertised. Jump back.

We all know that ink and toner cartridges eventually empty out. But a laser printer’s imaging drum also has a limited lifespan, and the cost of replacement often gets ignored in cost-per-page calculations. Roughly speaking, the wear on the drum adds somewhere between a half cent and one full cent to the cost of toner for each page. But sometimes, the toner and drum are sold as a single unit, so you don’t have to do any additional math to get the real cost per page. We’ve consciously tried to account for toner and drum costs in all of our predictions here, unless otherwise noted. Jump back.

Some people swear by third-party toner and even third-party imaging drums. It’s certainly tempting, because it can cut the cost per page by 75 percent. We’ve never tested any of these products, but based on what we’ve read, it seems like a more reliable option than using third-party ink in an inkjet printer. Toner is a simple substance, and laser printers don’t seem to purposely disable themselves whenever they detect non-OEM cartridges. We’d love to look into this some more, but honestly, it’s not our top priority. Use at your own risk, and feel free to share your experiences. Jump back.

4. A reader shared the steps he took to fix the sleep problem with his Brother HL-L2340DW, and they seem to work: Running OSX 10.10.5, encountered the same problems with deep sleep and the printer not able to wireless print. Wanted to add that I’ve successfully fixed this problem by 1) enabling IPv6 using the printer interface (on the printer’s panel select Network => TCP/IP => IPv6=On) and 2) disabling deep sleep. To do this, on the printer’s panel select General Setup => OK, Ecology => OK, Sleep Time => OK. While Sleep Time is displayed (showing a number in minutes) push the down arrow and then the back button at the same time. The Deep Sleep setting will then be visible. Turn Deep Sleep on by using the arrow keys => OK. I then unplugged the printer for 10 sec., and plugged back in. I’m using the Brother CUPS driver. Jump back.

Ben Keough is a freelance tech writer and editor. A contributor to The Wirecutter, he was previously an editor in chief at Reviewed.com, and he has written for USA Today. He spends most of his time hiking and taking photos of Santa Fe sunsets.

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